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Promoting Your Film on Social Media

Raising awareness of your projects over social media doesn’t have to be a chore. Yes, it can be a lot of work, but if you have a clear game plan before you start, everything is going to have a much better chance of falling into place when you need it to. Maximizing the impact that each social media platform provides will make all that hard work of shooting your film mean that much more in the end.

Content

The content you post for social media is both the easiest and hardest thing to develop. It needs to be impactful while coming out on a regular basis without coming out too often to be annoying to your users.

Here you are going to want to create a schedule before you start. The schedule should include when you are going to post content and what sort of content you are going to post. This is also a good time to start building a cache of images like concept art or posters that you can send out at a moment’s notice. You can also use online tools such as HootSuite to pre-schedule posts.

Some examples of good content to publish are casting announcements, the start and end of shooting, and behind the scene photos.

If you have someone else running your social media marketing, make sure that you have clear rules about what can and cannot be posted. There isn’t anything more frustrating than an accidental leak of a major plot twist or even a surprise cameo.

Posting

There are two major factors to remember when posting to social media, what you are posting and how much.

When deciding what to post, it’s important to remember that your Twitter followers want content with substance in each post otherwise it will begin to look like spam and they will ignore you. Pictures and graphics are going to give you the most bang for your buck in terms of information density and interest to your viewers. These are a good place to show behind the scenes photos or concept art to get people excited about your project.

Maximizing the impact of each type of social media is an important skill to master. For instance, while it might be tempting to use every one of the 144 characters Twitter allows, you should avoid the temptation. If users want to share with other people or add their own thoughts, there won’t be enough room. Instead, aim for between 100-120 characters, enough to get a thought across while still allowing room at the end.

Cross Promotion

Once you have places and content to give to your followers, it’s important to try to get viewers from one medium over to another. Facebook is the best place to have as your “home base” social media platform because it lends itself to longer form updates and supports multiple media formats such as pictures and video. From here you can have links to other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

Your other platforms should play to the strengths that they have when cross promoting. Twitter posts can be made more often, so it is not necessary to include all your other platforms in one post. Instagram doesn’t allow links within their post descriptions, but does not have a character limit so instead you can point followers to your profile with the relevant links.

If you have a Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign, it’s important to add your campaign link to any posts during the fundraising time period. Otherwise you risk not making your goals and will have to look elsewhere for funds.